


omnia mutatur, nihil interit

by ahala, antyllus



Series: omnia mutatur, nihil interit [1]
Category: Julius Caesar - Shakespeare, Rome (TV 2005)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Curses, Historically Ambiguous, M/M, Mythology References, Post-Assassination of Caesar, References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:48:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22899034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahala/pseuds/ahala, https://archiveofourown.org/users/antyllus/pseuds/antyllus
Summary: following the assassination of julius caesar, grief becomes as potent as a dagger, and just as deadly.
Relationships: Mark Antony/Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger
Series: omnia mutatur, nihil interit [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1645882
Kudos: 8





	omnia mutatur, nihil interit

Rome was suspended in terror, thunder beating in its heart as storm clouds manifested in the sky and stagnated there for days. It made the passage of time difficult to gauge, though time had been a fickle thing for a while now. Days felt like years, weeks like minutes, hours like months, seconds like the beat of a drum beneath quinquereme decks. Caesar was dead, and had been for days now, days which had dragged by.

Still, Brutus could not seem to scrub the blood off of his hands, from under his nails, and the distinct feeling of freefalling had begun to settle under his skin, a strange sensation of being in the open ocean with no knowledge of where to go from here. Foolishly, he had entertained the idea that the knowledge would just come to him like some preordained instinct within his tyrannicidal stock. Given how fervently his allies had been convincing him of such, it didn’t surprise him that its repetition had permeated in his mind like smoke on a tunic. He had always been sensitive to impression, and he berated himself for believing in it. The Stoic in him recoiled at his regret. 

“Brutus, are you alright?” Cassius queried from across the table, rousing him from his thoughts. The evening melted into the disquietude of night, and the loss of the sun made Brutus surly and stagnant. 

“Perhaps a little tired.” His words were curt, and rudely so..

Servilia scrutinised him. “You’re very pale. Do you feel hot?”

“Thank you, Mother, no.”

“Maybe you should go lie down for a bit.”

Brutus set his cup down roughly, his mouth fixed in an irate line. “You are more than welcome to discuss anything you’d like with our guests, and I won’t be averted. I think the time for any dissent for what you have to say has passed.” Servilia looked at him curiously. She might have been shocked if Brutus tried harder. She had been pleased with him, and therefore her pride and love growing with it; there was no discernible reason for Brutus to be so upset, and yet he was. “Excuse me.” He stood and retreated into the house. 

In all fairness, he was feeling strange, but he didn’t think it was illness so much as the wear of exhaustion on his body and a malaise that lingered in his mind. His back ached as he walked, only proving his point, and furthering his steps towards his bedchambers. He shut the door behind him and leaned against it with a sigh that was quickly cut short as the pain worsened.

He cursed under his breath and reached back to rub at his back, to no avail. A strange ripple bit up and down his spine and he twisted away in discomfort. It settled deep in his lower back, just before his tailbone. Before he could comment to himself how strange the sensation was, a flood of headrush overcame him and he quickly sat on his bed and laid on his side, closing his eyes tight. Stress had a way of infecting every part of the body, disrupting every part of homeostasis in the most unpleasant ways. There was no doubt that the last few months had taken their toll on him, and surely this pain was simply a culmination of that existence. 

Brutus drew his feet up and undid the thongs on his sandals, letting them slide to the floor with uncharacteristic abandon. His feet were cold to the touch, and they tingled weakly as he rubbed them. He shifted to tuck his feet under the bedspread. The movement made the joints in his back pop and he hissed as he felt two of his bones grate together like two plates of stone. He arched his back to right them, but instead, a shooting flare of pain shot up his spine and rested at the base of his skull, dwelling there like a migraine. Brutus sat up once more, bones aching, quickly and stiffly pulling his tunic off. He went to the mirror on the wall and turned to gaze at himself. 

Eyes narrowed, he scanned across his skin for any irregularity and found none but a few new freckles along his ribcage. He ran his fingers across what he could reach and paused as he ran over a strange patch. Brutus leaned in to the mirror, brow furrowing. It felt like an abrasion just beneath a thin layer of his skin, and looked like the same: a dark line muted by his skin tone. He scratched at it until, red and inflamed, the skin gave, allowing to pick out the abrasion. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before, like a pine needle no longer than his thumbnail had been stuck beneath his skin. He winced as he tugged it out like an ingrown hair. He ignored the small flow of blood that began to stream from the abrasion’s absence. 

Brutus looked closely at the little pine needle-esque thing. It was a little shaft with small tendrils sticking out from the curved stem in the centre of the apparatus. He pulled the tendrils and found that it was more of a leaf than a needle, and soon after than, more of a feather than a leaf. The tendrils had dried and, once the dried blood had cracked off, Brutus found the tendrils were soft and yielding. It  _ was _ a feather. 

As he leaned to get a cloth to wash the blood from his back, he was seized by a sharp pain there and could only stand helpless and ride out the tight, sharp pain. He turned again to look at his back. Had he been any less attentive, Brutus might have missed the irregular shift of his bones, sliding against one another in such a bizarre fashion, Brutus might have thought they were alive and sentient. He reached back and pressed on them and, after a sickening crack resounded, he erupted in a seizing pain. 

Brutus gasped for breath, gripping onto the wooden poster of his bed so tightly his nails scratched against the oak, pushing the nail back into his cuticles. His shoulder blades cracked and another shudder contorted through his spine. His skin tingled and burned, sweat pouring from his clammy flesh, dripping onto the floor loudly. He choked out a cry, sinking to his knees and curling over his legs. 

“Dominus?” came a timid voice on the other side of the door. Brutus bit back his wail. Whispers and the pitter-patter of sandals hurrying away.

“Marcus? Marcus are you alright?”

He tried to speak, but his mind couldn't come up with the words, couldn't make any sense of Latin or Greek or anything at all besides the fear that made his limbs bright with adrenaline and his heart charge like a racehorse. Another violent shudder tore through his spine, several cracks and pops in its wake, and a retch couched from his throat. 

The door opened, slamming against the wall. “Oh,” Servilia breathed. “Juno’s mercy….” Her voice turned imperious, “Send for a doctor.” A slave scurried away. She took Brutus’s bare body in with wide eyes, a trembling hand coming to cover her mouth. His skin had turned black as a new moon from his calves down as if someone had fixed a tourniquet there and left it for days in preparation for some sort of amputation. His back was grotesque, with strange bones pressing against his skin. “Marcus, darling,” she whispered. “Can you hear me?” Slowly, as if she was before a lion, she knelt to the ground, reaching out to stroke his head. 

His lips stuttered, his voice fought for words. He lifted his head and gaze at her. His eyes were rheumy and clouded, shadowy and undefined where a honey brown iris should have been. A guttural wail overcame whatever he was about to communicate and he seized, muscles flexing. To Servilia’s horror, a spray of viscous blood erupted from his left shoulder blade, some sort of limb protruding from his upper back and ripping its way down to the small of his back. She stood immediately and began to back away, praying aloud. 

Brutus was gasping laboriously. Wildly, he reached his hand back and groped for the limb, which stood like a monolith, though greatly deformed and gleaming with blood. He took hold of it and began to pull it out, revealing a long, jointed appendage that had been folded beneath his skin. It fell heavily to the floor, triggering another spray of blood from the other side of Brutus’s spin. However, as this appendage began to push out from his back, it began to tear the flesh between the two unnatural limbs. His head fell to the ground heavily and his body sagged, lifeless, stilling even as blood continued to well out. 

Servilia ran to the door and slammed it behind her. Her chest heaved, nausea festering in her stomach, head light in disbelief. A slave looked at her expectantly. Trembling, she smoothed her hair and found drops of blood there. “Lock this door from the outside. Dismiss the physician. Send everyone home.”

“What shall I say if they ask what has become of the master?”

She wasn’t sure if he had simply lost consciousness or passed in his violent throes of anguish. “He...he’s very ill and cannot be seen for a few days.” No one would believe it, and Servilia knew. His cries were that of a man being tortured. She knew of no illness that would elicit such a response, and yet she could not say  _ what _ had befallen her son. It was beyond this world, surely, and within the dealings of the gods. The thought made Servilia’s throat clench with worry. 

The slave went on his way and Servilia retreated through the eerie silence of the house to her bedroom. She shut and locked the door behind her. The feeling of fear and distrust surrounding her perception of her first child was a terrible feeling, treasonous to her instincts as a mother. She had never flinched when her infant son spat upon her, nor did she fail to hold him as a physician reset his bone, but this… Rejection had filled her heart, and she could not bring herself to feel guilt over it. 

Servilia paced about her room, haunted by the sight of all that blood, of those two gorey appendages breaking out from Brutus’s skin, of the way his eyes fixed on her, desperate and yet unseeing. Like a monster. Like some curse from the gods. She exhaled hotly, leaning against her chest of drawers.  _ Like some curse _ … How could she have forgotten?

A curse punctuated by spitting disdain. A curse bestowed upon her by a grieving widow. A curse slung at a harpy of a woman and her spawn.


End file.
